Writing, etc.

Stephen Glover on NOTW phone hacking: lay off, we’re dying

A painfully constant theme of journalists talking about their trade is the wail that things are hard enough for them already and papers shouldn’t make things harder by criticising their own industry. You get it from Dacre, you get it from Wade, and this morning, you get it from Stephen Glover in the Independent.

Glover indentifies a conspiracy between the BBC and the Guardian to push the NOTW phone hack story. If I was looking for the ingredients of a conspiracy in this business, I’d probably be looking at the organisation that’s been paying off the victims of its own criminal actions. Not Glover:

Most of this story was old. We already knew eight-tenths of it, though we had probably forgotten we did. Nonetheless, it was imaginatively repackaged by those symbiotic organisations, The Guardian and the BBC, and sold as new. The Corporation had been put on red alert by the newspaper at a senior level well before the story broke.

In the next paragraph, he dismissively mentions the part of the story that was new – the vast pay-offs – and instead accuses the BBC of being vindictively anti-Murdoch. Has it been? The BBC routinely runs heavily on critical media stories about its own actions. During the Brand/Ross farrago, most bulletins led on the outrage; when the BBC executives’ expenses were released, a large chunk of PM was devoted to picking them over. The BBC is an imperfect organisation and there’s plenty that it should be criticised for, but the best I can say without having a breakdown of broadcast-minutes-per-story is that the BBC has given no more prominence to the phone hack story than to any of those (probably much less important) stories. In contrast, News International has barely acknowledged that it’s under discussion.

But Glover is distressed to see the press’ failings exposed, as his ad hom attack on Nick Davies shows. First he silkily denigrates the investigative work of Flat Earth News by calling it “a book which suggests that the press is wildly dysfunctional” (my emphasis), and then, having failed to represent Davies’ ideas fairly, he goes on to give a poisonous description of his personality:

I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting him, but he seems to me a misanthropic, apocalyptic sort of fellow – the sort of journalist who can find a scandal in a jar of tadpoles.

What Glover doesn’t mention – and this is curious given how aghast he was a few paragraphs ago at Newsnight’s failure to reveal a perceived conflict of interest in Peter Wilby’s commentary – is that his own employers (along with every other Fleet Street institution) were substantially and specifically criticised in Flat Earth News. Glover is also a columnist for the Daily Mail. Apparently that’s not relevent to his views on Davies, though. Nor, seemingly, is the fact the Indy and its parent company have their own reasons to be displeased with the Guardian’s media coverage.

Still, it’s not as though Glover approves of the dark arts. It’s just that his “guess is that most newspapers have cleaned up their act”, and anyway, newspapers have more important things to think about than the quality or legality of their investigations:

Naturally I do not condone newspapers listening into the private conversations of celebrities, though I would have no problem in the case of a minister who was on the fiddle or betraying his country. I do know that the national press is weaker than it has been for more than a century, with most titles losing money, and I regret that, at such a time, The Guardian and the BBC should use largely old information to weaken it further

When pundits speaking for the press adopt this line, they sound like nothing so much as Angie Watts weedling Dirty Den to take her back by pretending she only had six months to live. There’s no other organisation from which newspapers would allow such claims: MPs who complained that the heavy reporting of the expenses scandal was undermining public respect for parliament were, rightly, ridiculed. The idea that newspapers’ problems come from an excess of self-examination is – as this indulgent, incoherent and partial article inadvertently shows – equally absurd.

It was widely maintained in the press that the great unwashed should have greater access to MPs expenses, in order to discourage/avoid corruption.

I think we should also have greater access to newspapers’ expenses for similar reasons. If (pfft!) they are concerned about their privacy, I’ll be happy just to see those expenses relating to the procurement of data.

I would agree with you Sarah. Glover’s screeching is an attempt at smoke and mirrors.
His lot have been as much involved in the odious business as News Intl and bitching at the messenger (Guardian and BBC, but not every other publication) stinks.
But then, as Tim (above) has pointed out in the past, The Indy has gone downhill somewhat. Maybe it’s just bottomed out with Glover’s two-pence worth.

Not so sure about the expenses revelation Tim… I’m only allowed to claim for milage and parking at my paper. I can’t recall “entertaining sources” unless you count a cup of tea down at Captain Jaspers cafe on the Barbican with the local Domestic Abuse Services manager. Do you really want to know about that?

About me

I’m a columnist, critic and feature writer with bylines at the New Statesman, the Guardian, the Spectator, the Independent, Eurogamer, Stylist, Grazia, Elle and more. Regular TV and radio appearances, including Newsnight and Today. Available for teaching and talks. Anti-fun feminist. Represented by Juliet Pickering at Blake Friedman.